Cormac Newark
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226670188
- eISBN:
- 9780226670218
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226670218.003.0013
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Voice as a metaphor for national self-determination was a familiar element in commentary on opera, critical and literary, in the nineteenth century. The subject was often Italy: natural birthplace of ...
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Voice as a metaphor for national self-determination was a familiar element in commentary on opera, critical and literary, in the nineteenth century. The subject was often Italy: natural birthplace of the art form and, during almost the entire period, a state in a continual process of becoming. But the “silver fork” novel The Opera (1832) by Mrs. Gore offers a thoughtful exploration of that metaphor set not in Italy but in England, where the state was undergoing a somewhat different process. This essay discusses representations of singing in a variety of media—ranging from textual reports to domestic and theatrical performances—embedded in Gore’s narrative. It does so with the aim of mapping out her implicit interpretative framework, which is firmly predicated on various other meanings of “voice,” but artfully constructed around a principal character, La Silvestra, who is a fashionable prima donna. It shows how the novel exposes to illuminating scrutiny the questions of class, artistic patronage, gender, and representative democracy that were particularly pressing in England at the time Gore was writing, during the debating of the Reform Bill (1831–1832) and the beginnings of the female suffrage movement.Less
Voice as a metaphor for national self-determination was a familiar element in commentary on opera, critical and literary, in the nineteenth century. The subject was often Italy: natural birthplace of the art form and, during almost the entire period, a state in a continual process of becoming. But the “silver fork” novel The Opera (1832) by Mrs. Gore offers a thoughtful exploration of that metaphor set not in Italy but in England, where the state was undergoing a somewhat different process. This essay discusses representations of singing in a variety of media—ranging from textual reports to domestic and theatrical performances—embedded in Gore’s narrative. It does so with the aim of mapping out her implicit interpretative framework, which is firmly predicated on various other meanings of “voice,” but artfully constructed around a principal character, La Silvestra, who is a fashionable prima donna. It shows how the novel exposes to illuminating scrutiny the questions of class, artistic patronage, gender, and representative democracy that were particularly pressing in England at the time Gore was writing, during the debating of the Reform Bill (1831–1832) and the beginnings of the female suffrage movement.
Dianne F. Sadoff
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199560615
- eISBN:
- 9780191803499
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199560615.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter examines the silver fork novels or fashionable novels that emerged from the 1820s to 1840s. The fashionable novel bridged the historical gap between lesser-gentry and upper-class romance ...
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This chapter examines the silver fork novels or fashionable novels that emerged from the 1820s to 1840s. The fashionable novel bridged the historical gap between lesser-gentry and upper-class romance and the Victorian novel's middle-class domestic realism, enabling a transition sparked by the satire of status anxiety. Silver fork novels serve as records of the era's manners and morals, as indices of social change, class mobility, and a shifting political landscape. Examples include Disraeli's Vivian Grey, Hook's Sayings and Doings, A Series of Sketches from Life, Robert Plumer Ward's Tremaine, or the Man of Refinement (1825), and Thomas Henry Lister's Granby (1826).Less
This chapter examines the silver fork novels or fashionable novels that emerged from the 1820s to 1840s. The fashionable novel bridged the historical gap between lesser-gentry and upper-class romance and the Victorian novel's middle-class domestic realism, enabling a transition sparked by the satire of status anxiety. Silver fork novels serve as records of the era's manners and morals, as indices of social change, class mobility, and a shifting political landscape. Examples include Disraeli's Vivian Grey, Hook's Sayings and Doings, A Series of Sketches from Life, Robert Plumer Ward's Tremaine, or the Man of Refinement (1825), and Thomas Henry Lister's Granby (1826).
Roger Parker and Susan Rutherford (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780226670188
- eISBN:
- 9780226670218
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226670218.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
Samuel Leigh’s New Picture of London (1839) promised its readers a way of making sense of the English capital at a time when it was, through expansion and diversification, becoming ever more ...
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Samuel Leigh’s New Picture of London (1839) promised its readers a way of making sense of the English capital at a time when it was, through expansion and diversification, becoming ever more bewildering to its inhabitants. We argue that one important way of coming to terms with the implications of that diversity is to consider London through the medium of voice: the speaking, shouting, singing, preaching, groaning, sighing, even sobbing voices—singly, or in concert, or in imagined representations—that sounded through the city during two tumultuous decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. Our volume begins on London’s street with itinerant balladeers and organ boys and ends with scientific experiments on acoustics, including en route essays on domestic singing, amateur choral societies, elite opera houses, popular performers, religious orators, and on the perception of voice in some key literary works of the period.Less
Samuel Leigh’s New Picture of London (1839) promised its readers a way of making sense of the English capital at a time when it was, through expansion and diversification, becoming ever more bewildering to its inhabitants. We argue that one important way of coming to terms with the implications of that diversity is to consider London through the medium of voice: the speaking, shouting, singing, preaching, groaning, sighing, even sobbing voices—singly, or in concert, or in imagined representations—that sounded through the city during two tumultuous decades in the first half of the nineteenth century. Our volume begins on London’s street with itinerant balladeers and organ boys and ends with scientific experiments on acoustics, including en route essays on domestic singing, amateur choral societies, elite opera houses, popular performers, religious orators, and on the perception of voice in some key literary works of the period.
